The crazy-smart folks at the Participatory Politics Foundation who do all the hard work at OpenCongress.org are ready to show off two new ‘widgets.’ One is for tracking bills and the second lets you track issues in Congress. The bill tracking widget allows you to display the status of any bill in the Congressional pipeline, as well as link to news and blog coverage of that bill.

The issue widget lets you select from one of more than 4,000 different issue areas, and display either the most recent bills or the most-viewed bills in that issue area for your community. We figure this ought to be pretty useful to folks who follow issues, rather than specific pieces of legislation.

And the team at OpenCongress.org had made it easier to make social wisdom about Congress more widely accessible across the internet, so they added social sharing buttons to pages for every bill, Member of Congress, and issue area throughout the site. These buttons allow one-click re-publishing of any page to popular services like Digg, del.icio.us, MyYahoo, NetVibes, and many more — there’s even a one-click button to e-mail any page to your friends. Check it out on this example.

Have at it. For any technical questions, get in touch with David Moore at drm at ppolitics.org.